Death of a Member: Baroness Thatcher

Lord Birt Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Birt]

My Lords, over a long career in broadcasting, I had many encounters with Mrs Thatcher, as she then was. Some were surprisingly endearing, even tender, and some were extremely challenging, as noble Lords might expect, especially when I was at the BBC. I see the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, is with us today. When Mrs Thatcher left No. 10, the staff in her private office clubbed together to give her as a parting gift a shortwave radio. The noble Lord said, “Prime Minister”, as she was for another day or so, “this is so you can be angry with the BBC all over the world”.

I first encountered Mrs Thatcher almost 40 years ago when, as a young television producer at ITV, my colleagues and I, several of whom I see here with us today in the Chamber, chronicled the deepening crisis in the UK in that grimmest of decades to which many of your Lordships have already referred—the 1970s. It was a decade of stagnating state-run industry, of accelerating inflation touching almost 30%, of three-day weeks, of the Times unpublished for a year, of widespread industrial strife and thrombosis. It was a decade in which the UK had to turn to the IMF for a standby credit.

On “Weekend World”, where I worked at the time, we canvassed proposed solutions to our dire circumstances on both left and right. We took a particular interest in the ideas of Keith Joseph, not mentioned yet today, and his then protégé Margaret Thatcher. She did not emerge as Leader of the Opposition fully formed. I recall her as a tentative and nervous interviewee under Peter Jay’s intense and rigorous cross-examination. Her fiery conviction would come later.

When Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, the country was anxious for all that to end—but the resistance that she had to overcome was still enormous, including, as others have said, from within her own party. But as we know, her conviction intensified, her determination grew and her courage proved formidable. Mrs Thatcher set out single-mindedly to address her toxic inheritance, and in due course she did indeed eliminate inflation. She introduced discipline to our public finances, she privatised the nationalised industries and she brought the trade unions under a new system of law. All that reform was unavoidable, but it also, as others have suggested, came at a high social cost.

In other ways, her premiership was not clear cut. Mrs Thatcher was an economic but not a social liberal. She was viscerally uneasy about Europe yet embraced the single market. She hated communism, but she championed détente. As we all do, she left behind unfinished business—in her case an under-resourced, underperforming public sector. While she liberated markets and inspired a new spirit of enterprise in the UK, we would in due course learn that without strong and effective regulation we would suffer gravely from untrammelled market excess.

However, if Churchill saved us from Nazi domination and if, as the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, has already mentioned, Attlee was the architect of a benevolent social state in the UK, it was Baroness Thatcher who reversed our post-war economic decline and restored Britain’s confidence and standing, and who offered her successors a chance to build a new Jerusalem.

In an interview for the series on her premiership that she recorded for the BBC after she left office, Lady Thatcher declared,

“the Prime Minister should be intimidating. There’s not much point being a weak, floppy thing in the chair”.

She was never that—she was a very great Prime Minister indeed and truly the right person at the right time. The nation is deeply grateful to her.